Chapter 78
Aberdeen Royal Infirmary’s Orthopaedic Trauma Unit should’ve been a place of peace and healing, a tranquil space to recover in after serious bone-shattering injury or the kind of violent surgery that still involved saws.
Where conversations were held in hushed whispers as life-saving machinery went ping and hissssss.
Instead, a torrent of yelling and howling and shouting and screaming and swearing overflowed into the corridor outside.
Logan shoved through the door, into chaos.
Half a dozen officers in the full uniform, complete with stabproof vests and high-vis, formed a wall outside one of the small, four-bed rooms that lined the ward’s outer edges. Shuffling about. Looking as if they were all amped-up to do something . . . but didn’t quite know what.
An equal number of nurses bustled from room to room, doing their best to keep their patients calm and reassured. Which can’t have been easy, given all the bellowing going on.
Another three were over by the nurses’ station. One sitting on an office chair, with his head thrown back and the front of his scrubs awash with scarlet from a shattered nose, while his colleagues tried to staunch the bleeding.
Logan skidded to a halt on the polished hospital floor. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
A no-nonsense nurse in the white-trimmed dark-blue top of a ward sister, stormed over, grey perm quivering as she jabbed a finger into Logan’s chest. ‘Are you in charge here? Because this is not acceptable!’
She ducked as a crrrrrrrrrsssssshhhhhhhhhhh of shattering glass turned the four-bed room’s window into a mess of spider webs.
Inside, a large, hairy young man shook a ward chair at the broken glazing – like a lion tamer, holding the assembled officers at bay. Assuming they allowed half-shaved gorillas in blue jeans and denim jackets to join the circus as staff rather than exhibits.
What was it PC Kent called that look, a Torry Tuxedo?
. . .
Bloody hell, it was as well: the guy who’d been lurking outside the burnt-out hotel with a bunch of flowers and a mylar balloon. Darryl Something-Or-Other, whose dad was ‘a man of strong opinions’.
Spudgun sidled over. ‘We got the call twenty minutes ago, Guv. Your man,’ pointing at Mr Hairy, ‘shoved his way in here, wanged a member of staff,’ pointing at the medical drama bleeding all over itself at the nursing station, ‘marched in there, and barricaded the door before Security could arrive.’
‘Then why are you not booting the door in?’
The Ward Sister poked Logan again. ‘Because there are four extremely vulnerable patients inside, you idiot!’
God’s sake . . .
‘And has anyone actually tried talking to him?’
She threw her hands in the air. ‘No, we didn’t think of that. How very silly of us.’
‘Won’t talk to anyone but you, Guv.’
‘Me?’ Logan pulled his chin in. Violent nutters only ever asked for you by name when everything was about to go horribly wrong. But four vulnerable patients were four vulnerable patients. ‘OK . . .?’
Deep breath and he parted the thin black-and-fluorescent-yellow line, walking forwards till he was just six feet from the shattered window. That would be far enough, wouldn’t it? In case anything got hurled through the glass?
Inside, Hairy Darryl lowered the chair and blinked at him.
Logan faked a smile. ‘Hey, Darryl. It is Darryl, isn’t it?’
A nod.
‘Right. From the hotel.’ Looking around. ‘This is all a bit of a mess. Why don’t you come out so we can talk about whatever’s bothering you?’
His voice was muffled by the glass, but clear enough: ‘You were right.’ Wiping his nose on his sleeve.
‘It’s what happens when bastards think it’s OK to hate brown people, and Jews, and Muslims, and poofs, and Celtic supporters just cos of who they are, yeah?
“You can commit atrocities,” you said, “even kill kids.”’ Then Darryl looked over his shoulder, at the bed in the far corner. ‘Not any more.’
Yeah . . . That didn’t sound good.
Logan edged closer, and the names written up on the little whiteboard by the door came into focus: ‘1: ALBERT HAMILTON ~ 2: MORRIS PEARSON ~ 3: GEORGE MAIR [NBM] ~ 4: SPENCER FINDLATER’.
Sodding hell . . .
‘Darryl?’ To hell with flying glass. Logan stepped right up to the broken window, peering through the cracked webs. ‘Darryl: what have you done?’
Spencer Findlater lay flat on his back, in the bed furthest from the door. There seemed to be a lot of bandages and fibreglass casts keeping his limbs together – so much of it that Spencer might even have looked a little comedic in other circumstances.
He had a pillow draped across his chest and his head tilted back at an unnatural angle. Mouth and eyes wide open.
Not moving.
Not even breathing.
One arm dangled over the edge of the bed, the hand weirdly reminiscent of Adam’s – reaching for God on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Only, as Spencer was reaching downward, probably safe to assume that his appointment was with a slightly more . . . subterranean deity.
It was Sergeant Jeff Downie on the custody desk today, with his hooded eyes and ghostly glow. A man who clearly came from a long line of people who believed in never marrying a stranger when a first cousin would do. Or a sibling.
Word was he had webbed feet and double the usual number of toes.
Logan hung back, by the wall, as a couple of burly PCs led Darryl Merickson away to his cell. Quiet as a headstone. As if he was finally at peace with himself.
Tufty signed Downie’s clipboard, acknowledging deposit, then wandered over, hands tucked into the armholes of his stabproof.
A frown on his daft wee face ‘Not entirely certain how to feel about that one. I mean, we think Spencer Findlater maybe helped burn the hotel down, which makes him a horrible, racist, killing-innocent-people person, plus there’s all the breaking-in and nicking things, but did he deserve what he got?
’ Making a seesaw gesture with one hand.
‘Murder’s murder.’ Logan made for the stairwell. ‘Doesn’t matter what your motivation is, or what the victim’s done. It’s still murder.’
‘True.’ Skipping after him. ‘We can has tenses, now?’
‘Somehow, I’m not in a celebratory mood.’
The wee lad drooped.
Suppose all this horror wasn’t really his fault.
Tufty wasn’t the one who’d given Darryl Merickson the excuse he needed to kill someone.
No, that was all on Logan.
‘Yeah, OK. Off you go.’
‘Woot!’ The wee loon scampered away, through the doors and up the stairs, like Cthulhu hearing Tara sing.
Logan let a heavy sigh slump out into the custody suite, then tromped after him.
The incident room for Operation ‘Find Natasha Agapova’ had grown a thick lining of file boxes – piled almost head-high, all bearing varying thicknesses of dust. Towers of paperwork were heaped up against it, along with stacks and stacks of old newspapers.
As if Steel and her team had decided to try the hoarding lifestyle.
No idea where the rest of them had got to, but she was the only one here.
With her feet up on the desk. Schlurping away at her newly acquired NorrelTech mug, chomping on a bacon roll while she perused an old copy of the Scottish Daily Post. Peaked cap still rammed on tight enough to curl the tops of her ears over.
Completely oblivious to the fact Logan had just walked into her grubby lair.
He knocked on the table. ‘“This what they call working now, is it?”’
She didn’t look up. ‘Aye.’
Why did he even bother?
Logan had a quick squint at the whiteboards, with their coating of scribbled actions and arrows and photos and notes. ‘Have your baboons found anything useful?’
Munch, munch, munch. ‘The reason I’m reading this right-wing crap-wank, is it’s all connected.
You think Spencer Findlater and Charles MacGarioch burned that hotel full of migrants for a giggle?
Sod-all happens in a vacuum.’ Poking the paper.
‘These bastards spend their lives shoving hate-and-fear-mongering bollocks down everyone’s throats: migrants are stealing your jobs, migrants are raping your women, migrants are grooming your kids.
Eating the dogs and the cats of the people who live here .
. .’ Slurp. ‘And when morons like Spencer Findlater and Charles MacGarioch decide to do something about it, the tabloids clutch their pearls and it’s all “violent mobs don’t represent British values!
” Then they go right back to mongering the same shite all over again. ’
‘She said, cynically.’ Logan pointed at the board. ‘What about our organised-crime angle? Get anything out of SOCT?’
‘Oh aye. Had to do a bit of wheedling, but seems our boy Adrian Shearsmith’s been dangling his hook in a dirty pond full of Russian sharks. And you know what nice people they are.’
Logan lifted the top off a file box – more Scottish Daily Posts: ‘CIVIL SERVANTS BLOCKING brEXIT BENEFITS’, ‘MIGRANT INVASION OVERWHELMING NHS’, ‘EU PLOT TO FLOOD OUR BORDERS WITH MIGRANT CHAOS’.
Lovely.
He put the lid back on. ‘So maybe these Russian mobsters kidnapped his ex-wife for a bit of leverage?’
That got a laugh. ‘You kidding? Wasn’t what you’d call an amicable divorce. Unless your idea of “amicable” is a cage-fight with rusty chainsaws.’
Logan tried another box, flipping through the newspapers inside.
All the headlines were much the same: ‘Migrants, paedos, crime, crime, murder, migrants, migrants, rape, lefty judges, paedos, migrants, blame the EU, murder, ECHR, migrants, drugs, paedos . . .’ He puffed out his cheeks.
‘Why do people read this crap? Is the world not bad enough without some knuckle-dragging “journalist” tit making-up stuff to be scared of?’
He tossed the last paper back in the box.